Sections

Insurance helps Kenya's herders protect against drought

Date Published:

06/18/2012

Summary:

Every time a drought has hit this elderly couple's village in northern Kenya they have had to rebuild their lives all over again. (..) By then Wacho and Dawe had lost 10 of their 15 cows, but they danced too. They knew they would struggle to support their nine children without these animals but this drought was different -- for the first time in their lives Wacho had taken insurance out on some of their cattle. (..) "Micro-insurance for agriculture is something that farmers in the rest of the world have had access to for sometime," says Challiss McDonough from the World Food Programme. (..) WFP and Oxfam America have their own micro-insurance initiative for agriculture in Ethiopia and it's now being expanded into Senegal.